We’d like to share our thoughts on the latest trends impacting our clients. In this section, we give you access to the theory behind our work on visitor participation and interactive storytelling.
At the AAM 2010 conference, Matthew Fisher will join a panel discussion on “Letting Go? Historical Authority in a User-Generated World”. During this session, panelists will explore the challenges, paradoxes, and opportunities associated with mashing up social media with conventional, authoritative museum narratives.
Lately it seems as though just about everyone is jumping on the Drupal bandwagon: toy manufacturer Mattel, legendary musician Eric Clapton, and even the White House. With such a star-studded assortment of individuals and organizations building their websites in Drupal, it’s no small wonder that the project is laden with awards and growing at a phenomenal rate. It’s not just celebrities that use Drupal, however. In the past several months, we’ve recommended Drupal as a solution for an increasing number of clients.
In early 2009 we completed a year-long collaboration with the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA), producing 32 short films on their collection for their newly-installed interactive Dialogtable and developing its corresponding website. With the Dialogtable drawing great interest and acclaim for facilitating exploration and conversation around the museum’s rich collections, UMMA has invited Matthew to be a part of their Wednesday Night Museum series, which features museum leaders, scholars, and artists addressing the challenges and potentials of 21st century museums.
At the 3rd Annual International Barcode of Life Conference in Mexico City last month, Matthew Fisher presented Connect.BarcodeofLife.net — an online community for DNA barcoding professionals.
HINT: Use the "full" button in the slideshare controls above to view the PowerPoint fullscreen, in order to read the labels describing the site functionality.
The first Tuesday of every month, Philly NetSquared invites one and all to Net Tuesdays, an event promoting dialog and discussion within and beyond the new media community, and a place where "web innovators and social changemakers to socialize, strategize, learn from and inspire one another."
This week Matthew presented on "PhilaPlace for Non-Profits: Promoting your vision and mission online", discussing PhilaPlace, a project on which Night Kitchen is currently collaborating with the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
"Museum exhibits that integrate personal and creative responses into exhibits and collections and encourage visitors to participate in the dialog."
Therein is the crux of Matthew’s presentation last week at the annual Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums conference in Saratoga Springs, NY. Entitled "Museums and the Social Web: Integrating Visitor Voices into Museum Exhibits" Matthew emphasized the importance of two-way communication between cultural institutions and their public. Today’s museum visitors are looking for experience that takes them beyond static information, shifting from a traditional museum model wherein the institution presents a single, authoritative voice to a model with which they can engage institutions in a dialog, fostering a democratization of voice and encouraging the creation and contribution of original content.
We are proud to say that the Art of Storytelling interactive that we developed with the Delaware Art Museum back in 2008 continues to inspire visitors around the world to share their stories around artworks in the museum’s collection.
The verdict is in - Matthew’s Crowdsourcing Culture panel at this year’s Global Creative Economy Convergence Summit was a huge success! As the voice of the multitudes shifts from a passive to active role in the fields of business, design and even politics, this presentation, which you can now check out on slideshare, was significant in bringing this newfound relevance of the crowd to the forefront.
Social media tools are being used not just for outreach, but for sharing resources and furthering scholarly work – this is the hope of Bruce A. Falk of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. As a guest blogger on the Center for the Future of Museums site, Falk discusses the value of expanding the ways in which the intellectual community thinks about and makes use of Web 2.0 tools.
We hear more and more about Web 2.0’s myriad tools and innovations in business, media and increasingly, education. However, with technologies changing on nearly a daily basis, it can be intimidating to approach, let alone adopt, many of the advances that are revolutionizing how we communicate, interact, work, play, and live.
